CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

IAB Templates for Gimp 2.4

One of my first commercial web design jobs involved producing sets of banners and buttons for a marketing agency. It wasn't the most glamorous work, but it paid well and provided good work experience.

At the time I was a Windows user and I remember having to create the images from scratch. I had to reference the IAB Ad Unit Guidelines for each new image so as to get the correct dimensions.

Anyhow, I've recently started creating some banners and buttons for Ubuntu. I've been using Gimp to create the images and I wanted a quick-and-easy way to create a new file with the correct dimensions. To accomplish this I edited Gimp's templaterc file and created a new template entry for each of the IAB Ad Units. Those being:

Rectangles and Pop-Ups:

300 x 250 px - Medium Rectangle
250 x 250 px - Square Pop-Up
240 x 400 px - Vertical Rectangle
336 x 280 px - Large Rectangle
180 x 150 px - Rectangle
300 x 100 px - 3:1 Rectangle
720 x 300 px - Pop-Under

Banners and Buttons:

468 x 60 px - Full Banner
234 x 60 px - Half Banner
88 x 31 px - Micro Bar
120 x 90 px - Button 1
120 x 60 px - Button 2
120 x 240 px - Vertical Banner
125 x 125 px - Square Button
728 x 90 px - Leaderboard

Skyscrapers:

160 x 600 px - Wide Skyscraper
120 x 600 px - Skyscraper
300 x 600 px - Half Page Ad

Install the template file

You can get the file here: http://crunchbang.org/misc/templaterc.txt

Or, if you're an Ubuntu Gutsy user you can follow these instructions:

1. Close Gimp if it's running

2. Open a terminal and backup your 'templaterc' file with the following command:

cp ~/.gimp-2.4/templaterc ~/.gimp-2.4/templaterc-bak

3. Still in the terminal, enter the following command to download my 'templaterc` file:

wget http://crunchbang.org/misc/templaterc.txt

4. Move the file to your Gimp directory with the following terminal command:

mv templaterc.txt ~/.gimp-2.4/templaterc

5. Start Gimp, select "File -> New" from the menu and select the template you want.

6. Create a beautiful web banner or button to promote your favourite free OSS!